A Tulane University senior is one of five New Yorkers charged with taking college entrance examinations for 15 high school students from a well-to-do section of Long Island who paid them hundreds of dollars -- in one case $3,600 -- with the hopes of getting high scores that would help them get them into top-flight schools.

View full sizeHoward Schnapp, Newsday via APJoshua Chefec, left, Adam Justin, background center, and George Trane, right, are escorted from the Nassau County district attorney's office, in Mineola, N.Y., after being charged in a widening college entrance exam cheating scandal.

Joshua Chefec, 20, a senior Tulane business student, turned himself in to the Nassau County district attorney's office on Tuesday. He and the four other men have been booked with one count each of scheming to defraud in the first degree, falsifying business records in the second degree and criminal impersonation in the second degree.

"If you wanted a good test score, these were the people to go to," said Chris Munzing, a spokesman for Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice.

If convicted, each man could face up to four years in prison and a $5,000 fine. Munzing said Rice isn't seeking prison time.

All five have pleaded innocent and were released without bail. Their next court appearance will be Jan. 5.

Meanwhile, their movements are not restricted. That means Chefec can return to Tulane to take his end-of-semester examinations, which will start Dec. 12, said Brian Griffin, his attorney.

He is accused of taking one test for one student before he enrolled at Tulane, Griffin said. The allegation that Chefec impersonated that student was investigated in 2009 by his alma mater, Great Neck North High School, and was found to be without merit, Griffin said. Chefec was not available for comment.

Any action Tulane might take against Chefec will happen after the judicial process is concluded, Tulane spokesman Mike Strecker said.

Because the 15 students accused of hiring Chefec and the other defendants are minors, Munzing said their names and the charges against them -- all misdemeanors -- cannot be disclosed.

The scheme started in 2008, he said.

The students who allegedly hired the five defendants come from an affluent section of Long Island sometimes known as the "Gold Coast." Great Neck's two high schools, including Chefec's alma mater, are among the top high schools in New York state; 97 percent of graduating seniors go on to college, according to the district's website, while the annual dropout rate is less than 1 percent.

Munzing said the five defendants signed up to take the tests at schools where no one would be likely to know the students who had hired them, and they showed up with fake identification they had made.

On at least one occasion, one defendant flew home from Atlanta, where he is a sophomore at Emory University, to impersonate two students and take the SAT twice in one weekend, Munzing said.

All five defendants are male. But one was paid to take the test for a girl "whose name wasn't gender-specific," Munzing said.

The scheme began to unravel this year, he said, when school officials heard rumors about the hired test-takers and conducted an internal investigation, looking for students whose scores were much better than their grades might lead one to expect.

They turned their results over to Rice's office, Munzing said.

Even though security is a top priority for the organizations that administer the tests, representatives say the Long Island allegations have led explore doing more.

ETS, which administers the SAT under a contract with the College Board, spends $25 million a year on security, and it regularly disqualifies hundreds of questionable scores, spokesman Tom Ewing said.

Security measures have included checks of students' identification, handwriting analyses and checking for cheating while the tests are being administered, he said. Also, among students who take a test several times in hopes of improving their scores, the computer kicks out scores that increase dramatically.

But in the wake of the Long Island case, ETS has hired a security-consulting group led by former FBI Director Louis Freeh to see what more it needs to do, Ewing said.

ACT Inc., the organization that administers the other entrance exam, has set up a task force to evaluate test-related procedures and recommend improvements, spokesman Ed Colby said.

As a general rule, the testing firms do not take any legal action against students whom they suspect of cheating.

The other defendants. all from Long Island, are Sam Eshagoff, who goes to Emory University; George Trane, a student at Stony Brook University; Adam Justin, who attends Indiana University; and Michael Pomerantz, for whom no college information was available, Munzing said.